Hunting and gathering in the digital era

Way, way back in the early days of mankind, guys had their hands full on a daily basis: gathering food was the main task for primitive man, and this was no picnic — or drive-through at Mickey D’s for that matter. No, early man spent vast amounts of time, energy and calories simply trying to track and knock down something and drag it home to eat.

In those days, hunting and gathering was almost a form of entertainment itself: scouting the odd, lagging wooly mammoth, plotting and planning how and when to move in with the spears, playing a few rounds of “Run like sh*t, it’s a saber-toothed tiger!”

It couldn’t have been easy. So we men really have very little to complain about in modern times, when coming across food is as easy as speed dialing Yellow Cab Pizza on your iPhone and hunting around for your wallet.

But you know what’s really hard to do? Hunt for entertainment. Especially if you’re married or in a relationship, and you need to find something to laze around and watch together on a regular basis. There’s basic cable TV, of course, but I don’t have to tell you, it takes a certain degree of whipped resignation to settle for whatever’s showing on TV. Flipping around cable basically means you’ve given up; you don’t care anymore; you’re done hunting.

That’s sad. At this point, a guy may as well plod around the mall in flip-flops and a faded Star Wars: The Phantom Menace T-shirt. Because it’s obvious you don’t care anymore about keeping up appearances.

Hunting for entertainment shouldn’t be that difficult for us modern males, because we theoretically live in a time of abundant entertainment options. There are video stores (a few left, anyway). There are traded AVI files. There are downloadable viewing vistas to explore.

There are even places online where you can watch movies for free. (Two sources come to mind: YouTube actually streams a crapload of movies, everything from the original Total Recall to Woody Allen comedies to Hammer films like Satanic Rites of Dracula; then there’s TopDocumentaryFilms.com which streams hundreds of docs free, from Michael Moore exposés and history to comedy and rock bios.)

So why does it all seem like such hard work? Why do we men have to drag ourselves out of the cave, day after day, knuckles scraping the ground, looking for something fresh to fill the entertainment void?

I personally blame the box set.

The whole box set phenomenon has had a peculiar effect on modern viewers’ appetites, much as more efficient tools and hunting methods expanded the dietary options of prehistoric man. With stones to club beasts and fire to cook the meat, Joe Caveman no longer had to settle for grabbing the odd lizard that couldn’t slip away and chewing its cold carcass; now it was barbecued reindeer, mammoth meat, and the occasional cave bear on the spit most nights.

Likewise, we modern humans are spoiled for entertainment choices. And it’s the box set that has made our appetites more ravenous. We used to settle for one TV show per week; now it’s half a dozen (or more) episodes in one sitting. Work? What’s that? Screw that!

Not so long ago, my wife and I snobbishly avoided watching TV shows altogether. We were movie people, damn it. But a while back, when even the selection of obscure indie-type movie fare out there started to dwindle, we caved. Before you knew it, we were in box set land, catching up on all seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica. We were dipping our toes in new shows like The Killing and Homeland, and of course jumping on the Game of Thrones bandwagon. The good thing about being such unabashed TV snobs for so long is that we really had a lot of catching up to do, so we didn’t have to hunt far to find tons of old stuff to watch.

But even that phase is starting to wind down now. When you have to wait a full year for the next 10 episodes of Game of Thrones or Boardwalk Empire because you’ve Hoovered up the whole season in a two-day binge, you’re very quickly left back where you started: the cave fire of the old TV is growing dim.

So what is there to watch?

And who is going to hunt and gather it?

The “Hoovering” image is apt, because our increased appetite for entertainment is a lot like drug addiction. (David Foster Wallace had that absolutely and prophetically right in Infinite Jest.) They used to say, in the ‘80s, that cocaine was God’s way of saying you had too much money. Well, now the Internet — and all its downloading options — is God’s way of saying you have too much time on your hands (and possibly too little imagination). And nature just hates a vacuum.

So we watch, and we gather, and we watch. Et cetera. Ad infinitum. It’s a natural by-product of progress. Man worked harder before just to stay alive and avoid being eaten. Now we have a new kind of problem, if you want to call it that: leisure time. And slaying time is man’s new chief occupation.

So buck up, modern hunters and gatherers: it’s another day to face, another void to fill, another TV season to fire up on the old cave wall.

After all, are we not entertained?